From: Ingrid Andersen (i.andersen vodamail.co.za)
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--fell
Def: adjective: 1. Fierce; cruel; lethal. 2. In the idiom, in one fell swoop (all at once, as if by a blow). verb tr.: 1. To knock down, strike, or cut down. 2. To sew a seam by folding one rough edge under the other, flat, on the wrong side, as in jeans. noun: 1. The amount of timber cut. 2. In sewing, a felled seam. noun: A stretch of open country in the highlands. noun: The skin or hide of an animal.
Ah - thank you. The sinister meaning of the word "fell" was new to me. I
now have a richer understanding of that childhood rhyme:

I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why, I cannot tell.
But this I know, and know full well:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.

Ingrid Andersen, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa

From: Susan Kroll (goatfarm olypen.com)
Subject: fell

There's another meaning for "fell" that perhaps only a weaver would be
familiar with: when a cloth is being woven on a loom, the fell of the
cloth or the fell line is that point where the cloth is being made. Up to
the fell line is the woven cloth, the next pass of the weft incorporating
it into the cloth moves the fell line up one thread, and so on.

Susan Kroll, Sequim, Washington

From: Steven Crane (stauros yahoo.com)
Subject: re: fell

This word appears with two meanings in Clemence Housman's The Were-wolf.
White Fell says
her name is derived from the fur robe she wears, but in her wolfish form
she is fell indeed.

Steven Crane, Louisville, Kentucky

From: Jane Meyerding (mjane u.washington.edu)
Subject: Fell

Re: the "skin or hide of an animal" meaning of the polysemantic word "fell"
and specifically re: the usage example:
"Felt bearing pads are made from non-tanned fell."
A.S.G. Bruggeling and G.F. Huyghe

My father's brother died of anthrax contracted from the non-tanned fell
straps of a knapsack he bought in Mexico. This would have been in the mid
1930s, I believe. The animal in question had died of anthrax. When Uncle
Gus loaded up the pack and headed out into the landscape, the straps of
the pack wore through the skin on his shoulders, with fatal effect.

I'm not sure if the same applies in the US, but in Australia the expression
"in one fell swoop" seems to have morphed into "in one foul swoop". I've
given up trying to point out the error.

Josh Shein, Sydney, Australia

It's not just in Australia. As the word fell in the sense of fierce or
cruel has fallen out of use, people try to make sense of the idiom with
other words, words that are familiar to them. You may see one foul swoop
or one fowl swoop.
These reinterpreted words are also known as eggcorns.
-Anu Garg

The expression "one fell swoop" is also a description used for centuries
in falconry. It describes the act of a falcon catching prey in only one
swoop of a fell -- a plateau or piece of open highland country (as you have
described) -- such a falcon would be highly-prized and any chicks bred from
that bird would fetch a premium price.

From: Meredyth Mackay (meredyth.mackay deewr.gov.au)
Subject: Pip
Def: 1. The small seed of a fruit, such as an apple or an orange. 2. Something or someone wonderful. 3. One of the dots or symbols on a die, playing card, or domino. 4. Any of the diamond-shaped segments on the surface of a pineapple. 5. An insignia on the shoulder indicating an officer's rank. 6. A disease of birds marked by mucus in the mouth. 7. Any minor, nonspecific ailment in a person. 8. The smallest change in the exchange rate for a given currency pair. Most major currencies (except yen) are priced to the fourth decimal place, so a pip is 1/100 of one percent (.0001). verb tr.: 1. To defeat, especially by a narrow margin or at the last moment. 2. To hit with a gunshot. 3. To blackball. 4. To peep or chirp. 5. To break through the shell of an egg when hatching.

The second count on the radio to announce the hour is also known as the pips.

From: Roger Trent (rtrent dhs.ca.gov)
Subject: Parity
Def: 1. Equality in amount, status, etc. 2. The condition of having given birth. 3. The number of children born by a woman.

Demographers, biologists, and medical clinicians classify women according
to their number of live births, with zero being nulliparous, a first birth
primiparous, and more than one multiparious. The accent is on the second
syllable. Lovely, fascinating words, but they have their place and don't
travel well. At a dinner party imagine calling a new mom a primipara.
That goes over about as well as asking if she enjoyed her gravidity, during
her confinement. Alas, lexical precision is no guarantee of popularity.

Seymour Cray -- chief designer of the Control Data Corporation CDC 6600 and
most related computers of that family -- had for years resisted adding
error-detecting parity bits to data values on his computers, saying "Parity
is for farmers."

Later he changed his mind, adding SECDED bits (single error correction, double
error detection) to memory words in the newer machines. When asked about this
change, he quipped that "More farmers have computers now".

Now farmers -- like nearly everyone else -- have computers.

From: Stephen Ross (SRoss unb.ca)
Subject: Parity

It is a nice coincidence, as I sit here at my computer (I'm visiting a
research lab in Japan), to find that today's word is parity. The coincidence
is that I am busy programming the "parity" of quantum states in a certain
type of molecule!

In physics, parity specifies how a quantity changes if all three spatial
dimensions are reversed. If the quantity is unchanged we say it has "+"
parity, if the quantity changes sign we say it has "-" parity.

As an example, velocity has negative parity. Imagine that you are heading
in a specific direction at velocity v. Now suppose that somebody decides to
relabel the directions so that they all point in the opposite direction. Your
velocity relative to the new direction would now be -v.

The parity of quantum systems was thought to be a conserved quantity in
nature - i.e. something that did not change. Then, in the mid 1950s, Lee
and Yang convinced Chien-Shiung Wu to do an experiment to test this. She
did and found parity can be violated. This means that the laws of physics
in a "mirrored" version of our universe would not be identical to what we
have in our universe. I find this rather spooky!

Lee and Yang won the Nobel prize for their theoretical work on this. Wu
did not share the Nobel prize but she set a number of milestones and is
still honoured by physicists.

Stephen Ross, Professor of Physics, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada

In Portland, Maine the local minor league baseball team is named the
Portland Sea Dogs.
Their mascot is a harbor seal with a baseball bat in its mouth.

Caroline Gavin, Portland, Maine

Email of the Week - (Brought to you by Smart Pills - The Perfect Cure for Stupidity.)

From: Phil Jans (phil.jans co.chelan.wa.us)
Subject: Fluke

Fluke Corporation has grown from a local Pacific
Northwest company to a global leader in the manufacture of precision
testing instruments. When I was a boy, my dad gleefully suggested a slogan
he thought they should adopt: "If it Works, It's a Fluke."

Phil Jans, Chelan, Washington

From: Barbara Ledger (bledger sympatico.ca)
Subject: Fluke

Here in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, there's a trucking firm with a sense of
humour, called Fluke Transportation. When sailing down
the highway, you'll often see their trucks, with the message emblazoned
on the side: "If it's on time. .. it's a Fluke."

Barbara Ledger, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

From: Bill Thieleman (thieleman.w ghc.org)
Subject: fluke or flounder

Fluke brought me back to my boyhood days of boating on Long Island.
Even though my father didn't believe that fish oil and teak decks mix well,
he showed me the difference between fluke and flounder.

They are both flatfish or teleosts but a fluke's right eye rotates to the
fish's left side, its mouth is bigger and full of teeth, and it swims
right side down. A flounder's left eye migrates over to its right side
(flounder, philander, roving eye), it has a smaller mouth with no visible
teeth and it swims left side down.

We frequently had fish on Fridays. They said the secret was to avoid
overcooking these fish. My secret is not to cook them at all....ecch!

There is a further, quite different, meaning of 'fluke': something accidental
or coincidental, as in 'It was a pure fluke that I met so-and-so in the
street today' or 'By a fluke the ball bounced off the goal-post and went
in'. Or is that only a British idiom?

Michael Graubart, London, UK

Going by the number of emails we've received, many readers didn't scroll
down to see the other definitions. It's all there.
-Anu Garg

From: Goldie Freeman (goldie.freeman comcast.net)
Subject: Re: fluke

I volunteer at the New England Aquarium and have been asked the difference
between fluke and flounder flatfish. Searching brought the answer that
the flounder is a right-side up fish and the fluke is a left-side up
swimmer. Flukes have larger mouths full of teeth.

This week's theme reminded me and my friend Brady about a dictionary game
that we like to play. It began one evening when we were hanging out and
I was flipping through an old, gigantic, 100 lb dictionary that I bought
for college years ago. I happened upon the word bay, and, impressed by the
number and variety of entries it had, I asked Brady if he could name them
all. Being the extremely cool guys that we are, we now play this game quite
often (with words other than bay, of course). Thanks for validating us!

Michael Strange, Brooklyn, New York

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a
living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the
circumstances and the time in which it is used. -Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,
jurist (1841-1935)